A social analysis of the digital search habits of internet users in Turkey based on Google search volumes

From the day they are born, humans continuously engage in the behavior of acquiring information. One of the easiest ways for humans to acquire information is through communication. Humanity has consistently developed its communication skills to access information more quickly and accurately. Undoubtedly, technology has played the most significant role in the development of communication. With technological advancements, new communication tools and methods have emerged. Humanity, which has continuously developed media technologies to disseminate information more easily to the masses, has seen the emergence of what is referred to in the literature as "new media," resulting from the digitization of media objects. New media has become the most significant method of information acquisition in human life today. The use of the internet is increasing day by day in both the world and Turkey. With the increasing use of the internet, internet users leave a wide range of traces and data as a result of their activities online. The searches performed by users on the internet, the sites they visit, the time spent on these sites, and many other behaviors constitute significant data sets. When these traces and data are analyzed broadly, it is believed that important findings related to digital search habits and information acquisition behaviors within the framework of "new media" can be identified. When scanning is conducted based on the obtained data and within the framework of digital search habits, critical insights into how and for what purpose society uses the internet can be gained. A review of the literature shows that data provided by Google has been the subject of study, with user behaviors observed and descriptive analyses of these behaviors conducted; however, these data have not been evaluated from a general perspective, nor has an examination been conducted on a societal scale. This thesis aims to analyze searches with a volume of over 1,000,000 conducted every month in 2024 via the Google search engine in Turkey using the descriptive scanning method, with the goal of making inferences about search habits in Turkey. When the findings are evaluated on a macro scale, it can be said that search engine users in Turkey use search engines to obtain current data that supports their daily lives, and the information accessed through search engines tends to be more focused on current, non-permanent information rather than data spanning a broad time frame.